Who, in some deranged state of mind, put the Liquor Control Board in charge of our transition to recreational marijuana? We passed an initiative to get them out of the wholesale liquor business to save us all some money. As a parting gift, they tripled the sin tax, and now we’re losing money to neighboring states who are significantly more cost effective.
Now they’re starting their own cartel. Let’s see, can’t use regular banks, so we’ll set up our own just like a drug cartel, answers the Liquor Control Board. Like the criminal cartels, of course you can’t allow competition, so there goes our reasonably well-working medical marijuana system. No more home grows for ill folks, just sky high prices from the recreational system. It’s not about criminal relief for pot users, it’s totally about how much tax money they can extort from the new system, the same failed plan they used with liquor.
News flash to the Liquor Control Board: check Craigslist where you can find excellent pot for $100 an ounce. And you honestly think your tax-inflated system can come close to competing?
How about the idiotic way they are selling the various pot licenses, then changing the rules after all the new pot businesses tried to fit into the original rules but now find themselves in an untenable situation? The state’s fear of the feds means we’ll have a totally unworkable system that can only be saved by a massive crackdown on any competing local growers. Not exactly legalization is it?
Steve Morse
Snohomish
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